Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond

While the current discussion of ethnic, trade, and commercial diasporas, global networks, and transnational communities constantly makes reference to the importance of families and kinship groups for understanding the dynamics of dispersion, few studies examine the nature of these families in any detail. This book, centered largely on the European experience of families scattered geographically, challenges the dominant narratives of modernization by offering a long-term perspective from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Paradoxically, "transnational families" are to be found long before the nation state was in place.

"The fundamental strength of this anthology lies precisely in its hubris. It invites the reader to put on a new and different set of glasses that reveal connections between kinship and historical turning points in ways never really considered before. Kinship takes on an agency that discombobulates the imperial and national geographies most historians take for granted." - Beshara Doumani, University of California, Berkeley

"[This volume] deals with a worthy and relatively unexplored topic through an admirably diverse array of chronological and geographical contexts. Like many other subjects, kinship needs to be understood outside of the traditional bounds of national history, and this work is an important step in that direction. ... the research is solid and well-founded." - Jason Tebbe, Stephen F. Austin State University

Christopher H. Johnson is Professor Emeritus of History and member of the Academy of Scholars at Wayne State University. He has held fellowships from the Leverhulme and the Guggenheim Foundations as well as the Social Science Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

David Warren Sabean is Henry J. Bruman Professor of German History at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has taught at the University of East Anglia, University of Pittsburgh, and Cornell University, and has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History in Gottingen, the Maison des Science de l'Homme, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the American Academy in Berlin, and the National Humanities Center. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Simon Teuscher is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Zurich. From 2000 to 2006, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also been an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel, a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the Universite de Neuchatel, as well as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, at Princeton.

Francesca Trivellato is Professor of History at Yale University. She earned a Ph.D. in economic and social history at the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan (1999) and a Ph.D. in history at Brown University (2004). She received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and was a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.